Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

One comment really nails the problem with this sort of thing:

" People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is¹; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.

No, the government sector doesn't just make missiles and bombs, it also covers schools, hospitals, many other things."

I'm very sympathetic to Ukraine and the desire to demonstrate or speak out, but I don't see how this instance is very effective, and doing it has a significant cost to the integrity of Debian, as this argument says:

> Russ Allbery agreed that the DFSG was not relevant; he also warned that citing the Social Contract and DFSG ""turns the conversation into rules lawyering without addressing the actual issue"". However, even though xsnow is DFSG-compliant, he did say that the flag display may be something Debian does not want in its archives:

> > I would, in general, say that software that behaves in deceptive ways, which includes hidden behavior changes based on usernames, locales, or other local settings or information that no user would reasonably expect to change behavior in this way is probably not something that we want to have in Debian. It's a very slippery slope and also likely to create a lot of drama to very little benefit.

One of the comments that struck me on the lwn.net site is the (albeit small) possibility that someone in Russia could be running the software and unintentionally land themselves in hot water if someone discovers these images on their computer. I'm sure that's not the intended consequence, but I could be problematic.

I was not totally clear on this. The article makes it sound like the behavior is in the debian patches, and not upstream?

I believe upstream is here, and has the same code as quoted:

    https://sourceforge.net/p/xsnow/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/xsnow/src/scenery.c#l332

  if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48() < 0.3)
     tt = MAXTREETYPE;

Has anyone confirmed who this 'Alexander Ivanov' person is or even if this is a real person and not some AI bot? I searched for the email address used and it only appears recently in these handful of posts about xsnow.

Most do not acknowledge the slippery slope exists until they are sliding down it about to hit bottom...

So next time something like this slips through and it runs rm -rf /* ? Then what?

Shit like this erodes trust.

I thought we all agreed that flags-as-political-statement in software were Certified Cringe after the one-click “add a French flag overlay to your Facebook profile photo” thing, eleven years ago?

How is seeing more Ukrainian flags a discrimination?

Discrimination implies something harmful. Like invading neighbor country and perpetrating genocide. This complaint says more about Ivanov than anything else.

One comment really nails the problem with this sort of thing:

No, the government sector doesn't just make missiles and bombs, it also covers schools, hospitals, many other things."

And that's not even so bad compared to what would happen to somebody in occupied Ukraine: they would be sent to "the basement." That's the euphemism for the local torture chamber, outside of which they deposit the dead bodies of the tortured to let everybody in the area know what happens if they do something like speak Ukrainian.

When the war started, Europeans were forcing famous Russians living in Europe to denounce their government's evils. For example an opera house demanded a Russian opera singer to say something against the regime or be "blacklisted".

As if it's so fucking easy to denounce a dictator who has murderous tendencies and who rules your homeland, as if it's so easy to insult him, and then what, not be able to return home and see your friends and family until that dictator is defeated?

I found those demands so unthinkingly heartless, it's responding to tyranny with your own tyranny...

How is this an issue? Xsnow is a novelty. You have to make two decisions: the first to still be using Xorg at all, the second to install the application itself which is essentially a gag screensaver.

The idea that some govt employee would get fired for this is extremely far fetched.

Slackware-current upgraded xsnow to the latest version in June 20th but applied a patch from ALT Linux that removed the protestware bits just because of this reason. I support this.

They don’t have to use the software. It’s such a non issue. Xsnow is closer to art than critical software, you can easily ditch it

Note that xsnow already displayed such flags randomly, and this just changes the probability.

This sounds like a you problem. Suppose you have software that shows famous faces and quotes as a screensaver would you make it by default not show anyone of color so it would be acceptable in rural Oklahoma or make it show no women so it would be acceptable in Iran?

That's also a good argument for completely removing rainbow flags from everything, in more countries than one. Will we see that happening?

I thought it would talk about the situation on the ground in Ukraine, but no...

Will anyone think of the poor Russians just trying to go on with their lives?

Do people in Russia realize how bad the situation is on the ground for Ukrainians?

>No, the government sector doesn't just make missiles and bombs, it also covers schools, hospitals, many other things.

Schools forming future soldiers, hospitals healing soldiers so that they can go back to the front...

The naivety here is astounding. The commenter, those who agree with him and all "normal" Russians would benefit to read Hannah Arendt:

https://philosophybreak.com/articles/hannah-arendt-on-standi...

Cue the famous quote...

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/04/good-men-do/

Yeah, but is open source so if some of the extra rare "good Russians" do not like this super small chance of getting hurt then they diserve their regime, they will finally protest when the regime will affect their own lives but stay silent while other people get genocided.

I do not own any popular software to put anti Zed/Putin shit in it so sorry I can inconvinience those super rare good Russians.

The simple solution that should make everyone happy is to simply document it. That way it is no longer a hidden behavior, and the Debian maintainer could even do that as a patch without the help of upstream.

It is interesting to read M. Allbery's comment side by side with the discussion here on Hacker News about a CLAUDE.EXE program with hidden behaviour that subtly changes the way that it outputs an information banner based upon timezones, hostnames, and domain names.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373

Further LWN commentary (as observed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518) is that the result would not be solely drama but potentially some fairly nasty real world consequences for some people.

Most do not acknowledge the slippery slope exists until they are sliding down it about to hit bottom...

I found those demands so unthinkingly heartless, it's responding to tyranny with your own tyranny...

I was not totally clear on this. The article makes it sound like the behavior is in the debian patches, and not upstream?

I believe upstream is here, and has the same code as quoted:

    https://sourceforge.net/p/xsnow/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/xsnow/src/scenery.c#l332

  if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48() < 0.3)
     tt = MAXTREETYPE;

it is in upstream. but the debian package maintainer is also the upstream maintainer.

So next time something like this slips through and it runs rm -rf /* ? Then what?

Shit like this erodes trust.

I wonder how many people immediately thought about whether similar things had been snuck into xfishtank and xpenguins.

How is seeing more Ukrainian flags a discrimination?

Discrimination implies something harmful. Like invading neighbor country and perpetrating genocide. This complaint says more about Ivanov than anything else.

The imputed discriminatory part is that the software only shows the additional flags to users with Russian locale, not that it shows the flags at all.

Yah that's where I stand on it. The message isn't harmful or hateful, it dares only make a political statement.

This point in the comments made me think twice:

> People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.

[EDIT: I see @krunck reposted this at the top level — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518]

Given the number of colonized people that speak Russian, including residents of Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, etc. etc. etc. I think this sort of Easter Egg based on language rather than geographical location is quite appropriate.

My family speaks both Ukrainian and Russian, and in Russian speaking spaces here in California we find many many many eager supporters of Ukraine's sovereignty, because when they hear Ukrainian spoken they tell us! And also tell us they wish they had been able to keep their non-Russian family language alive too. Most of these supporters are not from the Moscow or St. Petersburg areas though...

It's not even an anti-Russian statement!

I wouldn't get bent out of shape if Xsnow showed me a Canadian/Greenlandic flag in response to me using en-us.

Very much agreed. It‘s a statement by the authors of that software, and that is well within their rights.

How can anyone complain about Ukrainian flags, unless these people have a problem that the Ukraine exists.

The issue with that claim is xsnow already displayed the Ukrainian flag regardless. And it's in no way a critical app most people would even have installed to begin with. I had no idea it was even still being maintained.